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Reveal - a new perspective on debugging iOS apps
Take the guesswork out of iOS UI development by using Reveal to visualise your app's view hierarchy at runtime. You can even edit and modify views in your running application to see the effect immediately. No more recompiling to test simple visual changes. Debugging your apps will never be the same again.
revealapp.com
News
Cocos2d Version 3 Preview
The grandfather of 2D iOS game frameworks is about to get its second major update with a preview being released this week. Seems like the biggest things in this release are a much needed clean up of the API, Objective-C integration of the Chipmunk physics engine and a new set of UIKit style controls to make rendering and interacting with sliders, text areas and other controls possible without layering UIKit on top. It's also good to see them mention Apportable for porting Cocos 2D games to Android.
cocos2d-iphone.org
iOS 7 Keyboard Shortcuts
One of the lesser publicised improvements to iOS was the ability to better support keyboard shortcuts with the UIKeyCommand class. Better keyboard support in an iOS app is one of those things which is not going to be noticed by everyone but those people who do notice it are going to love you for it. In this article, Federico Viticci gives us some inspiration by giving us a run down of the shortcuts included in the stock iOS 7 apps. Oh and if anyone from Apple is reading, can we get ⌘-Tab in iOS 8 please? (This is the right place for me to make feature requests, right?)
macstories.net
Tools
A Quick Look plug-in for Provisioning
After his recent adventures with code signing and provisioning on Mavericks Craig Hockenberry has put together a QuickLook plugin for viewing detailed information on the contents of a .mobileprovision file. I previously had the MacMation plugin installed which did almost the same thing but this one from Craig displays more information along with links into the developer portal and other useful sites.
furbo.org
MoarFonts
It's always been a minor annoyance to me that Xcode doesn't pick up fonts from an Info.plist file and use them when rendering Storyboards or XIBs. Luckily Cédric Luthi seems to have had the same annoyance and rather than ignore it like I have been doing, he wrote an Xcode plugin to allow them to be viewed right inside Interface Builder.
pitaya.ch
Code
RBBAnimation
Robert Böhnke with a new layer based animation library which includes a replacement for CASpringAnimation along with a few other useful classes. Worth a look if you are looking for something like animate...usingSpringWithDamping at the layer level.
github.com
How To Efficiently Display Large Amounts of Data on iOS Maps
Fabulously in-depth explanation of how to implement a clustering algorithm for use with MapKit from Theodore Calmes. I wonder if we will ever get this functionality built into MapKit itself.
thoughtbot.com
Inkpad
It's always interesting to be able to dig through the source code of a non-trivial app, especially if you are new to Objective-C. I have linked to several open source projects like this in the past but the latest of them to hit GitHub is InkPad by Steve Sprang which was open sourced this week.
github.com
macOS Development
BeaconEmitter
This iBeacon emitter code for your Mac by Laurent Gaches, (based on a proof of concept by Matthew Robinson) might either be useful on its own or for testing while developing with an iOS app which utilises iBeacons.
github.com
Business and Marketing
Support Guidelines for Vesper
Dave Wiskus on how he deals with the support emails for Vesper. I also have one piece of advice on this subject that isn't explicitly mentioned here. I almost always start our support responses with an apology "I am sorry you are having trouble with [app]" making it clear that no matter what the problem, we are sorry that they are having issues which were annoying enough to them that they took the time to write to us about it. This article contains a great set of tips.
vesperapp.co
How to write an app press release
Dan Counsell with a great article on crafting a perfect press release. The only advice that I can add to this is that your press releases should tell a story which is much more than "We released an app". Talk about how people are using your app, maybe even a specific situation where it was useful to someone. If your app is going to stand out then a list of features is not enough.
dancounsell.com
And finally...
iOS Bitcoin Mining Bots
Even at it's very worst, my inner evil genius could never have come up with this... Horrifying.
macrumors.com